Today's computer networking environments, such as the Internet, offer mechanisms for delivering documents and other information between heterogeneous computer systems. However, in order for a computer to communicate with another computer, the computer must be able to identify and contact that other computer. Computers that are part of the Internet each have a unique numeric identifier, called an “Internet Protocol address,” that other computers can use for communication. Thus, when a communication is sent from a client computer to a destination computer over the Internet, the client computer typically specifies the Internet Protocol (“IP”) address of the destination computer in order to facilitate the routing of the communication to the destination computer. For example, when a request for a World Wide Web page document (“web page”) is sent from a client computer to a web server computer (“web server” or “web site server”) from which that web page can be obtained, the client computer typically includes the IP address of the web server.
In order to make the identification of destination computers more mnemonic, a Domain Name System (DNS) is used to translate a unique alphanumeric name for a destination computer, called a “domain name,” into the IP address for that computer. For example, the domain name for a hypothetical computer operated by digiMine Corporation (“digiMine”) may be “comp23.digimine.com”. Using domain names, a user attempting to communicate with this computer could specify a destination of “comp23.digimine.com” rather than the IP address of the computer (e.g., 198.81.209.25).
The subset of Internet sites that comprise the World Wide Web network also supports a standard protocol for requesting and receiving web page documents. This protocol, known as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (or “HTTP”), defines a message passing protocol for sending and receiving packets of information between diverse applications. Details of HTTP can be found in various documents, including T. Berners-Lee et al., Hypertext Transfer Protocol-HTTP 1.0, Request for Comments (RFC) 1945, MIT/LCS, May 1996. Each HTTP message follows a specific layout, which includes among other information, a header which contains information specific to the request or response. Further, each HTTP request message contains a Universal Resource Identifier (or “URI”), which specifies to which network resource the request is to be applied.
Thus, a user can request a particular resource (e.g., a web page or a file) that is available from a web server by specifying a unique URI for that resource. A URI can be a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”), Uniform Resource Name (“URN”), or any other formatted string that identifies a network resource. URLs include a protocol to be used in accessing the resource (e.g., “http:” for HTTP), the domain name or IP address of the server providing the resource (e.g., “comp23.digimine.com”), and optionally a server-specific path to the resource (e.g., “/help/HelpPage.html”), thus resulting in the URL “http://comp23.digimine.com/help/HelpPage.html” in this example. In response to a user specifying such a URL, the comp23.digimine.com server would typically return a copy of the “HelpPage.html” file to the user. In addition, in situations where the identified resource corresponds to an executable program on the web server (e.g., a CGI script, Active Server Page (ASP) file, or Java Server Page (JSP) file), the URL can be followed by a query string that will be provided as input to the executable program. Each such query string includes one or more query string parameter names accompanied by a corresponding value (e.g., the parameter names “name1” and “name2” and corresponding values “3” and “ab” in “digimine.com/search.asp?name1=3&name2=ab”). URLs are discussed in detail in T. Berners-Lee, et al., Uniform Resource Locators (URL), RFC 1738, CERN, Xerox PARC, Univ. of Minn., December 1994.
FIG. 1 illustrates how a browser application enables users to navigate among nodes on the web network by requesting and receiving web pages. For the purposes of this discussion, a web page is any type of document that abides by the HTML format. That is, the document includes an “<HTML>” statement. Thus, a web page is also referred to as an HTML document. The HTML format is a document mark-up language, defined by the Hypertext Markup Language (“HTML”) specification. HTML defines tags for specifying how to interpret the text and images stored in an HTML document. For example, there are HTML tags for defining paragraph formats and for emboldening and underlining text. In addition, the HTML format defines tags for adding images to documents and for formatting and aligning text with respect to images. HTML tags appear between angle brackets, for example, <HTML>. Further details of HTML are discussed in T. Berners-Lee and D. Connolly, Hypertext Markup Language-2.0, RFC 1866, MIT/W3C, November 1995.
In FIG. 1, a web browser application 101 is shown executing on a client computer 102, which communicates with a server computer 103 by sending and receiving HTTP packets (messages). HTTP messages may also be generated by other types of computer programs, such as spiders and crawlers. The web browser “navigates” to new locations on the network to browse (display) what is available at these locations. In particular, when the web browser “navigates” to a new location, it requests a new document from the new location (e.g., the server computer) by sending an HTTP-request message 104 using any well-known underlying communications wire protocol. The HTTP-request message follows the specific layout discussed above, which includes a header 105 and a URI field 106, which specifies the network location to which to apply the request. When the server computer specified by URI receives the HTTP-request message, it interprets the message packet and sends a return message packet to the source location that originated the message in the form of an HTTP-response message 107. It also stores a copy of the request and basic information about the requesting computer in a log file. In addition to the standard features of an HTTP message, such as the header 108, the HTTP-response message contains the requested HTML document 109. When the HTTP-response message reaches the client computer, the web browser application extracts the HTML document from the message, and parses and interprets (executes) the HTML code in the document and displays the document on a display screen of the client computer as specified by the HTML tags. HTTP can also be used to transfer other media types, such as the Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) and graphics interchange format (“GIF”) formats.
The World Wide Web is especially conducive to conducting electronic commerce (“e-commerce”). E-commerce generally refers to commercial transactions that are at least partially conducted using the World Wide Web. For example, numerous web sites are available through which a user using a web browser can purchase items, such as books, groceries, and software. A user of these web sites can browse through an electronic catalog of available items to select the items to be purchased. To purchase the items, a user typically adds the items to an electronic shopping cart and then electronically pays for the items that are in the shopping cart. The purchased items can then be delivered to the user via conventional distribution channels (e.g., an overnight courier) or via electronic delivery when, for example, software is being purchased. Many web sites are also informational in nature, rather than commercial in nature. For example, many standards organizations and governmental organizations have web sites with a primary purpose of distributing information. Also, some web sites (e.g., a search engine) provide information and derive revenue from advertisements that are displayed.
The success of any web-based business depends in large part on the number of users who visit the business's web site and that number depends in large part on the usefulness and ease-of-use of the web site. Web sites typically collect extensive information on how its users use the site's web pages. This information may include a complete history of each HTTP request received by and each HTTP response sent by the web site. The web site may store this information in a navigation file, also referred to as a log file or click stream file. By analyzing this navigation information, a web site operator may be able to identify trends in the access of the web pages and modify the web site to make it easier to use and more useful. Because the information is presented as a series of events that are not sorted in a useful way, many software tools are available to assist in this analysis. A web site operator would typically purchase such a tool and install it on one of the computers of the web site. There are several drawbacks with the use of such an approach of analyzing navigation information. First, the analysis often is given a low priority because the programmers are typically busy with the high priority task of maintaining the web site. Second, the tools that are available provide little more than standard reports relating to low-level navigation through a web site. Such reports are not very useful in helping a web site operator to visualize and discover high-level access trends. Recognition of these high-level access trends can help a web site operator to design the web site. Third, web sites are typically resource intensive, that is they use a lot of computing resources and may not have available resources to effectively analyze the navigation information.
It would also be useful to analyze the execution of computer programs other than web server programs. In particular, many types of computer programs generate events that are logged by the computer programs themselves or by other programs that receive the events. If a computer program does not generate explicit events, another program may be able to monitor the execution and generate events on behalf of that computer program. Regardless of how event data is collected, it may be important to analyze that data. For example, the developer of an operating system may want to track and analyze how the operating system is used so that the developer can focus resources on problems that are detected, optimize services that are frequently accessed, and so on. The operating system may generate a log file that contains entries for various types of events (e.g., invocation of a certain system call).
Thus, as noted above, interaction or usage data (e.g., web site navigation information or computer program event information) can contain important low-level information about interactions and usage that have occurred, but current techniques for extracting high-level summaries or analyzing such interactions or usage are limited. For example, it would be useful in many situations to know the number of occurrences of interactions or uses of a specified category or type during a specified time period, or to know how such occurrences relate to other occurrences of interest. Similarly, when a sequence of interactions or uses is of interest, it would be useful to know the number of occurrences of each interaction or usage in the sequence. In addition, analysis of interaction or usage data is further complicated when the format or content types of such data changes over time, such as to reflect changes in a corresponding web site or computer program. It would therefore be useful to have techniques for effectively identifying and extracting useful high-level information from interaction or usage data, and for tracking changes in the format or content type of the interaction or usage data. Accordingly, techniques for analyzing interaction and usage data to obtain such information would have significant utility.